Dithyramb in Context

Edited by Barbara Kowalzig and Peter Wilson

Integrates literary, religious, historical, and visual evidence with current approaches and methodologies in ethnomusicology and historical anthropology

Brings together leading international experts in the fields of poetry, music, drama, and epigraphy

Illustrated throughout

Dithyramb in Context

Edited by Barbara Kowalzig and Peter Wilson

Description

The dithyramb, a choral song associated mostly with the god Dionysos, is the longest-surviving form of collective performance in Greek culture, lasting in its shifting shapes from the seventh century BC into late antiquity. Yet it has always stood in the shadow of its more glamorous relations - tragedy, comedy, and the satyr-play. This volume, with contributions from international experts in the field, is the first to look at dithyramb in its entirety, understanding it as an important social and cultural phenomenon of Greek antiquity.

Dithyramb in Context explores the idea that the dithyramb is much more than a complex poetic form: the history of the dithyramb is a history of changing performance cultures which form part of a continuous social process. How the dithyramb functions as a marker, as well as a carrier, of social change throughout Greek antiquity is expressed in themes as various as performance and ritual, poetics and intertextuality, music and dance, and history and politics. Drawing together literary critics, historians of religion, archaeologists, epigraphers, and historians, this volume applies a wide historical and geographical framework, scrutinizing the poetry and, for the first time, giving due weight to the evidence of epigraphy and the visual arts.

Dithyramb in Context

Edited by Barbara Kowalzig and Peter Wilson

Table of Contents

AcknowledgementsTable of contentsList of contributorsList of IllustrationsConventions and Abbreviations 1: Introduction: The World of Dithyramb, Barbara Kowalzig and Peter WilsonI Social and Religious Contexts 2: Dancing Dolphins: Dithyramb and Society in the Archaic Period, Barbara Kowalzig 3: Becoming like Dionysos: Dithyramb and Dionysian Initiation, Salvatore Lavecchia 4: Demeter and Dionysos in the Sixth-Century Argolid: Lasos of Hermione, the Cult of Demeter Chthonia and the Origins of Dithyramb, Lucia Prauscello 5: Dithyramb and Greek Tragedy, Luigi BattezzatoII Defining an Elusive Performance Form 6: The Name of the Dithyramb: Diachronic and Diatopic Variations, Giovan Battista D Alessio 7: Athens and the Empire: The Contextual Flexibility of Dithyramb, and its Imperialist Ramifications, David Fearn 8: Cyclic Choroi and the Dithyramb in the Classical and Hellenistic period: a Problem of Definition, Paola Ceccarelli 9: The Semantics of Processional Dithyramb: Pindar s Second Dithyramb and Archaic Athenian Vase-Painting, Guy Hedreen 10: Music and Movement in the Dithyramb, Armand D AngourIII New Music 11: Songbenders of circular choruses : Dithyramb and the Demise of Music, John Curtis Franklin 12: Kyklops Kitharoidos: Dithyramb and Nomos in Play, Timothy Power 13: Satyr-play, dithyramb and the Geopolitics of Dionysian Style in Fifth-Century Athens, Mark Griffith 14: Performance and the Drinking Vessel: Looking for an Imagery of Dithyramb in the Time of the New Music, Alexander HeinemannIV Towards a Poetics of Dithyramb 15: The Poetics of Dithyramb, Andrew Ford 16: The Dithyramb, a Dionysiac Poetic Form: Genre Rules and Cultic Contexts, Claude Calame 17: Dithyramb in Greek Thought: The Problem of Choral Mimesis, Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi 18: One for whom the tribes dispute: The Dithyrambic Poet and the City of Athens, Giorgio IeranòV Dithyramb in the Roman Empire 19: Choroi and tripods: The Politics of the Choregia in Roman Athens, Julia L. Shear 20: Dithyrambos, Thriambos, Triumphus: Dionysiac Discourse at Rome, Ian RutherfordBibliographyIndex of PassagesSubject Index

Dithyramb in Context

Edited by Barbara Kowalzig and Peter Wilson

Author Information

Edited by Barbara Kowalzig, Associate Professor of Classics and History, New York University, and Associate of the former Centre Louis Gernet (now ANHIMA), Paris, and Peter Wilson, William Ritchie Professor of Classics, University of Sydney

Barbara Kowalzig is Associate Professor of Classics and History at New York University, and an Associate of the Centre Louis Gernet in Paris. Her research focuses on religion, music and performance, and cultural and economic anthropology in ancient Greece and the Mediterranean. She is the author of Singing for the Gods: Performances of Myth andRitual in Archaic and Classical Greece (2007; 2011) and has published widely on Greek song-culture, ritual, and drama.

Peter Wilson is William Ritchie Professor of Classics at the University of Sydney and the inaugural Director of the Centre for Classical & Near Eastern Studies of Australia. He is the author of The Athenian Institution of the 'Khoregia': the Chorus, the City and the Stage, Greek Theatre and Festivals: Documentary Studies (2007) and Performance, Reception, Iconography: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin (with M. Revermann, 2008).

Dithyramb in Context

Edited by Barbara Kowalzig and Peter Wilson

Reviews and Awards

"Important...Its cutting-edge contributions impressively succeed, even if, inevitably, some items appear repeatedly, while interpretations display contributors not singing from one dithyramb sheet. One of numerous strengths is that many different styles of scholarship are applied." - Greek and Roman Musical Studies